Glendon Scott Crawford faces federal judge in Albany who will sentence him for plotting to build a radiation device he intended to use to kill Muslims

A domestic terrorist from Saratoga County who plotted to use deadly radiation on Muslims in the Capital Region was sentenced Monday to 30 years in federal prison, but not before he delivered a rambling speech about physics, federal statutes and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Glendon Scott Crawford, 52, showed no remorse in U.S. District Court for his ghastly goal to use a mobile radiation-spewing device that could be hidden in a truck and set off by remote control. The defiant Crawford, an admitted member of the Ku Klux Klan, instead tried to convince Senior Judge Gary Sharpe he was wrongly convicted and only provided "technical assistance" to the plot — an argument Crawford immediately lost.

"You can't come to grips with who and what you are," the judge told the Providence man, a former mechanic at General Electric in Schenectady. "It's not up to you to be deciding who lives, who dies."

Sharpe, who spared Crawford a life sentence, told the defendant: "I don't know, if left to your volition, you could have created the device or not ... it would have made you a mass murderer."

In August 2015, federal jurors deliberated for less than three hours before making Crawford the first person in the United States convicted of attempting to produce or use a radiological dispersal device. Congress enacted the law in 2004 to protect the country from terrorists using a "dirty bomb."

Jurors watched seven hours of FBI surveillance video in which the brazen Crawford — a self-described cross between Darth Vader and Forrest Gump — excitedly talked about attacking the Executive Mansion in Albany, the White House and local Muslim institutions such as the Masjid As Salaam mosque on Central Avenue in Albany and Masjid e-Nabvi Islamic Center in Schenectady.

When offered a chance to speak Monday, Crawford highlighted the collapse of the Soviet Union and name-dropped several codes of federal law in an attempt to convince the judge that he was wrongly convicted of a law intended to stop those who would build a nuclear device. He claimed the indictment against him was fatally defective.

"An X-ray machine is an emitter," Crawford told the judge. "It functions by an entirely different technology."

Glendon Scott Crawford leaves the federal courthouse in Albany after being sentenced to 30 years in prison plotting to build a mobile radiation-spewing device to annihilate Muslims in the Capital Region. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union)

Frame grab from FBI surveillance video showing FBI agents raiding a garage where Glendon Scott Crawford, right, worked on a homemade radiation device he built with the intent to massacre Muslims. (FBI)